The poetry of broken-heartedness

Photo: Barbie Robinson

Being whole is the proposed purpose of a contemplative life. By the time you reach my age of the late fifties, one has been broken-hearted many times. Even the Japanese art of Kintsugi (where broken pottery is put back together with gold lacquer that reveals the breakages) may find it difficult to glue together the multiple broken-heartedness of a mature life.

It is not only the personal spheres that bring the inevitable heartbreaks from lovers, families, offspring, and friends. It is also the betrayal by the times in which we live, its leaders and ideologies, and the senselessness masquerading as truth.

In the Natya Shastra treatise on dance, dance scatters and fragments. Dance is not an attempt to glue the shards rather it is a choreography of broken-heartedness. Indeed, the Deity of dance, Shiva, urges the first stewards to include dance in their “pure” rituals so that the one becomes manifold. In a world where we celebrate “oneness” there is no place for splintering as worthy of contemplation. Even though fragmentation and splintering may be the significant experiences of most of our lives. Dance as the tapestry of diverse movement in time and space is the choreography of multiplicity.

In the most difficult times of my life, I have found that dance embraced the brokenness without attempting to “fix” it. This was not confessional or victimhood, which can easily seep into narratives of suffering. Rather it was as if the intelligence of broken-heartedness may simply unfold without the urgency to “solve”. This must be a creative exploration, where, paradoxical as it may seem, play is central to removing us from the “psychology” of suffering. One must have the inclination and the stamina for this kind of exploration, it is not possible at all times. The psychological narrative must be attended to and is equally important when we are overwhelmed by that domain. In my mind, an archetypal creativity of the dance of Natya Shastra is most safely undertaken when we can relinquish all narratives at the door of the invocation.

Broken-heartedness is the essence of dance in its poetry of yearning. The presence of dance in times of my heartbreak revealed the wisdom of yearning, and of it being the soil from which all sensation emerges. It is the yearning of the poetic soul, expressing in encounters which return us to the soul’s sensitivity and ache for beauty. In liberating this from the narratives that brought me to this experience, I was able to explore and express that sensation through dance. The personal became the archetypal.

One of the most important Rasas or archetypal sensations is yearning. In dance this manifests through the archetype of separation from the lover. Yearning is not limpid—it is ferocious, sensual, and assertive. The “yearner” is not a victim. The ancient archetypal dancer Apsaras flung their unbearable yearning into the world. They inflicted it upon Deities, humans, and Nature. Yearning is the flung poetry of the Divine—the lightning and thunder of a violent storm.

At this time in my life, I have a handful of my heart-pieces to offer and I am not inclined to glue it even with beautiful gold lacquer. Like a handful of flowers, this is my offering. I have found that it is when we are most human that we become the Kavi, the poetic Divine. And that in our handful of shards we are like the multiplicity of Nature with Her profusion of everythingness.

The poignant heart of Nature/Reality/Divine is yearning-drenched and we are infused with this same ache. In our broken-heartedness we find the poetry of our soul.

Photo: Barbie Robinson